When I lived in Austin, there were over 100 days of over 100 degrees, and a third of Houston’s trees died. We had a wildfire razing both sides of the river that we prepared for, though it luckily never got to us. My plants died, and I decided to move away.
In 2024, we’ve hit a climate crisis point of 1.5 degrees of warming.
I talked with my grandfather the other day. He said a town he had known his whole life near him in upstate New York had simply run out of water. There’s no more water there.
We don’t talk about how unnatural this is.
Currently there’s a drought on the east coast affecting many east coast cities.
We think of wildfires as razing California and droughts in Arizona, because that’s common. But on the east coast?
Unheard of.
In September 2024 we had Hurricane Helene displace millions of people in Asheville and Raleigh North Carolina.
The US is funding wars in Ukraine to the tune of $60 Billion and a genocide in Gaza for over $300 Billion and not basic human services or infrastructure. All this happens while most people are struggling. Most can’t afford a place to live, or to buy food, and are drowning in medical and school debt in an ongoing global pandemic for the last 5 years that has claimed hundreds of millions of lives.
I could go on.
This world is disintegrating right under our feet. It’s dying off. And this has all happened before.
What is a civilization?
A civilization can be a society with agriculture, multiple cities, military dominance in its geographical region and a continuous political structure. Given this definition, all empires are civilizations, but not all civilizations are empires. How long do civilizations generally last? According to this study in the BBC, about 300 years. The US was founded in 1776. In 2076, it will be 300 years old. But the civilization collapse is already starting, and we see it everywhere.
What is civilization collapse?
A collapse is a situation where there’s a tipping point – where, basically, stresses overcome societal coping mechanisms. It’s the loss of the state and the failure of multiple systems that underpin society. Jared Diamond, author of Collapse, identified three key indicators or precursors of imminent dissolution:
1. A persistent pattern of environmental change for the worse like long-lasting droughts;
2. Signs that existing modes of agriculture or industrial production were aggravating the crisis;
3. An elite failure to abandon harmful practices and adopt new means of production.
At some point, a critical threshold is crossed and collapse invariably follows. For example, the Roman Empire covered 4.4 million sq km (1.9 million sq miles) in 390. Five years later, it had plummeted to 2 million sq km (770,000 sq miles). By 476, the empire’s reach was zero.
Previous dying civilizations
- The Indus (2600 BCE to 1900 BCE)
- The Bronze Age, The Assyrians and the Babylonians 1177 B.C
- The Romans (390)
- The Anasazi (750-900)
- The Mayans (200-900 AD)
- Viking civilization in Norse Greenlanders (1000 A.D)
- Medieval Europe Feudal System & feudal fragmentation (1100-1400 AD) which led to the growth of pirates
- North America currently- megadrought, fossil fuels and the military industrial complex still dominantly contributing to this, and willful indifference from the ruling class
There are many more than these, these are just a few. Looking at this art, I am struck by the hands that shaped these pieces. How they lived in an empire they had been born into, and maybe never lived to see the end of. They thought of their empire as unchanging, forever, because it had always been that way. And then their empires fell, and now what we have is their art, and sometimes, their writing to remember them by.
Personally, I take comfort in the fact that this has all happened before, in so many eras. We can’t keep holding onto a world that isn’t working anymore.
We have to make a new world.
This old world, this old era, as it is dying off, is losing all of its energy and its potential. “If we don’t want to leave it up to chance or to the energies that built this old world and instead build a different world, a different era, we are the ones who have to build that.”
It’s up to us to build the new world.
As Luke Kemp says in the BBC,
We know what needs to be done: emissions can be reduced, inequalities levelled, environmental degradation reversed, innovation unleashed and economies diversified.
The policy proposals are there.
Only the political will is lacking.
We can also invest in recovery.
There are already well-developed ideas for improving the ability of food and knowledge systems to be recuperated after catastrophe.
Avoiding the creation of dangerous and widely-accessible technologies is also critical. Such steps will lessen the chance of a future collapse becoming irreversible.
We will only march into collapse if we advance blindly. We are only doomed if we are unwilling to listen to the past.
How would a new world look?
Look at Socialist Reconstruction. What kinds of government would we have? What sorts of public systems would we build? What if we built Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, like on Star Trek?
“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.”– Ursula K. Le Guin